Twelfth graders score record lows in basic reading, math skills

[arthwollipot]

Instead of hiring 'employees', because that is bad as it increases the numbers of 'public servants' (who are always bad), schools hire 'contractors' through contracting firms.

I was in the Australian Public Service when the Howard government started doing this. Overnight I stopped being an employee of the government and became the employee of a private for-profit company.

 

[dann]

No mention of the Covid year off effect?

The Covid year?! Really? A whole year?

Have you met no-lockdown Sweden? Where schools were kept open because it was important to reach herd immunity by infection sooner than everybody else. It was claimed to be what science had ordered!

The situation is very similar in Sweden; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (or the gap widens, at least), and this is true of education as well - to those that have shall be given...

I think that the cough that dare not speak its name at least deserves to be considered.

Did the Pandemic Break Our Brains? (Time Magazine, 2024)
COVID-19 has been linked to serious cognitive problems, including dementia and suicidal thinking. And brain fog, a common symptom of Long COVID, can be so profound that people are unable to live the lives and work the jobs they once did. But COVID-19 also seems able to affect the brain in subtler ways. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicinecompared the cognitive performance of people who'd fully recovered from COVID-19 with that of a similar group of people who'd never had the virus. The COVID-19 group did worse, equivalent to a deficit of about three IQ points.
(...)
It’s too soon to say whether that dramatic but short-lived period will have long-lasting effects—but four years after the virus emerged, some things are still not as they were.

Unlike the short-lived period, the virus itself isn't going anywhere. And there are several studies and headlines like this one, blaming lockdowns:
Teen brains 'aged' during Covid lockdowns, new research suggests (NBC News, Sep 9, 2024)

What they usually have in common is that they simply assume that any change must have been due to the measures that were put in place to protect people from the virus instead of being due to the virus itself, i.e. the logical fallacy: post hoc ergo proctor hoc.
Very few studies and MSM headlines look at what the COVID-19 infection may have done and is still doing to the brains of children who were and still are very often unvaccinated.

Look at what the AI tells you if you google How COVID-19 affects the brain. A short excerpt:

Persistence of symptoms:

• Neurological and neuropsychiatric symptoms can last for months after the initial respiratory symptoms have resolved, indicating that the involvement of the brain can persist long after the acute illness.
• These long-term effects have been observed in a significant portion of patients, even in young adults, highlighting the widespread and enduring impact of the virus on the brain.

And it's not as if we shouldn't have known better! This video is five years old!

COVID-19 May Cause Brain Damage in Children (TomoNews US on YouTube, July 9, 2020 - 5:26 min.)
LONDON — Children infected by the coronavirus could suffer brain damage without presenting respiratory symptoms, according to a study in JAMA Neurology. SOURCES: JAMA Neurology https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama...

 

[ahhell]

It could be a common problem that I've seen around Australia.

Instead of hiring 'employees', because that is bad as it increases the numbers of 'public servants' (who are always bad), schools hire 'contractors' through contracting firms.

The result is you have to pay a lot more money for the same (more typically less) service, and a big chunk of that money goes to the agency.

Every time this is done, more money is spent for less result.

There's never any follow up, where functions are brought back in house, because this is politically motivated, because all public servants are bad, and anything done by a government employee is bad.

Just one of those things.

Remember kids, Private Good, Public Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.

From what I can tell its largely administration staff in order to comply with all the state and federal compliance requirements.

@brainsters, regarding covid, it definitely had an impact, but this has been a long-term trend even before covid.

 

[dirtywick]

the covid year was a pretty good argument against homeschooling imo

 

[ahhell]

the covid year was a pretty good argument against homeschooling imo

Involuntary homeschooling for sure.